I’m not a literary expert, so I have to take this essay by Gerald Howard at face value. And, it’s an excellent essay, discussing how discussions of class used to be common in American fiction, but no longer are. Here are some excerpts: Work—especially the sort of work that gets your hands dirty and that brands [...]
Posts Tagged ‘class’
Class in American Literature
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged class, literature on August 26, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Plight of the Middle Class
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged class, Economic Debates on August 1, 2010 | 2 Comments »
“It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” –George Carlin That quotation best sums up the last 3o years. Baby-boomers are finding that they will never be able to retire, and college students are moving back in with their parents. All are mired in mountains of [...]
Economies for Profit or Consumption
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged class, inequality on June 22, 2010 | 3 Comments »
When economists cheerlead GDP figures, they do so based on the supposedly positive judgment that growth implies consumption gains, which means that people are better off. There’s good reason to be skeptical of this claim, even leaving aside distributional concerns. Robert Reich, in discussing China’s currency announcement, speaks well to the issue of a production versus consumption [...]
Deficits, Debt, and Class
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged class, Marxian on May 6, 2010 | 6 Comments »
When I attended the fiscal sustainability counter-conference, much of the discussion was theoretical and technical and avoided normative or political conjecture. All of the panelists were aware of the political landscape for deficity dovery, and were even more aware of the implications of deficit reduction for the poor and unemployed. However, until reading Rick Wolff’s latest, [...]
Moore on Moore
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Alternatives, class, Economic Crisis on September 24, 2009 | 5 Comments »
No subliminal messaging there, just some pun fun. Michael Moore’s movie, Capitalism, A Love Story, is premiering in theaters everywhere tomorrow. Naomi Klein interviewed him for The Nation, and one exchange struck me. NK: All right. Let’s talk about the film some more. I saw you on Leno, and I was struck that one of [...]
“Class War”
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged class, Economic Crisis, Healthcare, Marxian on September 16, 2009 | 5 Comments »
No, not talking about Notre Dame this time (although there does appear to be a war for the classrooms). [End hyperbole]. This article is the latest from Rick Wolff in MRZine, in which he argues that capitalists have been engaging in a class war since the 1970s (and have been pretty successful): Across the same 30-year [...]
Michael Novak on the Ethics of Capitalism
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged class, inequality, Poverty on August 4, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Speaking 2 weeks ago at the Chautauqua Institution, Michael Novak hold forth on the Ethics of Capitalism in a Friedman-esque fashion. Of course, he doesn’t come off as nearly that intelligent, at least not in the FORA.tv editor’s selected highlight clip, in which he talks about the rich-poor gap in response to a question from [...]
